The new outlaws: cities make homelessness a crime.

• Author: Howland, George, Jr.

Thomas O'Halloran played by the rules, and lost. The son of a San Francisco cop, he was born and raised in the Bay Area, attended parochial schools, and went to Stanford University. For nearly twenty-five years, he worked for Pacific Bell. In the latter part of his life, when his wife needed triple-bypass surgery, he spent their life savings--around $65,000--on her health care. After she died in 1991, O'Halloran became homeless.

One day last August, he was sitting on a bench reading a book, with all of his worldly possessions beside him in a shopping cart, when several police officers rode up to him on their motorcycles. The police issued O'Halloran a $76 citation for camping in a public park. O'Halloran could not afford to use any of his $250-a-month phone-company pension to pay the fine. The penalty automatically increased to $180, and the police issued a warrant for his arrest.

Since August 1993, 4,300 citations like the one O'Halloran received have been issued under San Francisco's Matrix program. Mayor Frank Jordan has vowed that Matrix will clean up the streets through strict enforcement of laws against blocking the sidewalk, trespassing, and sleeping in public.

Around the country, similar harassment campaigns against the homeless are under way. The National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty has documented crackdowns against the homeless in more than thirty cities since the late 1980s. In some cities, including Seattle, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C., new laws have been passed against begging, loitering, or sleeping in public. In other places, including Santa Monica, New York, and San Francisco, existing "public nuisance" laws, which have been ignored for decades, are suddenly being rigorously enforced.

Such efforts do nothing to address the complicated national crisis that homelessness has become. But politicians have found that cracking down on the destitute and "cleaning up" central shopping districts by moving the homeless to outlying neighborhoods wins votes.

Derrick Thomas learned the hard way that cutting across parking lots is illegal in Atlanta. In May 1993, Thomas was staying in transitional housing near the Omni Stadium. In the evening he went out to make a call at a phone booth near a parking lot. While walking across the lot, Thomas was stopped by a man who was parking his car and wanted change. The parking-lot attendant witnessed the interaction and misinterpreted it. The attendant came "running and screaming, |Don't pay him! Don't pay him!'" Thomas remembers. Thomas and the customer both attempted to explain but the attendant flagged down a motorcycle cop.

When the customer assured the police officer that Thomas had not been impersonating a parking lot attendant, Thomas was arrested under a different statute. "I was arrested for being an unauthorized person in a parking lot and taken to jail," he says. Thomas spent the weekend in jail because he had no money for bail. On Monday afternoon, the prosecutor informed Thomas that he could plead guilty and receive a five-day sentence which would include time served. If he pled not guilty, the prosecutor would ask the judge to delay the trial a week while the state prepared its case. Since Thomas can add, he chose the former. His story would have gone untold were it not for the efforts of the Atlanta Coalition for the Homeless, which has been documenting that city's...